Endangered
I’ll be honest- I felt as though director Drew Walkup didn’t have a focused narrative when there’s a stretch of “Endangered” that is set at a drug dealer’s pad, and a pet alligator is let loose on Allison (Lizzie Zerebko), the rideshare driver who’s our main character. But I underestimated the script by Adam Armstrong and Marcus Devivo he’s working from- they have more going on, and what started off fairly straightforward ends up being tense and a bit darker than we expected at the beginning.
Allison is down on her luck. The only reason she’s driving for a rideshare is because her architecture career has been derailed because she fell for the wrong man. Now, she’s stuck driving other people around to make end’s meet, occasionally stopping for lunch at the construction site of a building she designed. One night, she picks up a guy to take him somewhere, but he (Michael Olavson) doesn’t look like his picture. She’s hesitant, but still takes the fare. As she drives him, she continues to get an uneasy vibe from him until an accident forces them to work together.
The poster makes “Endangered” feel like a film you’ve seen dozens of times before, and indeed, you will feel that as the movie progresses. But at a certain point, things change, and the film shifts into something else entirely. The performances by Zerebko and Olavson are interesting to see how they play the shifts, and what works is how effortlessly it feels when they do. Walkup, Armstrong and Devivo keep the suspense churning, even if the climax it reaches feels very standard-issue, a bit disappointing considering how they were able to keep the twists moving well throughout the rest of the film. Where it lands is what matters, and “Endangered” is a smart thriller about the risks taken in trusting strangers.
